How to Find Your Social Voice

Many factors contribute to a successful presence on social media. Intriguing content, captivating photos and videos, and consistent posts all work to ensure your organization stands out, but one key factor that commonly gets overlooked is social voice. Your social voice is how you present your brand’s personality online. For example, your brand can be friendly, professional, knowledgeable or authoritative.

While finding your voice for social media marketing can be tricky, it is essential. Why? Only about 33 percent of social media users follow brands, and they are looking for an authentic, transparent relationship with the brand, or they will desert you. That’s why voice matters.

Here are answers to some of the most common questions we hear from destination partners about finding a social voice:

Why does voice matter?

Creating a voice for your brand is essential for many reasons. As we stated earlier, the most important reason is that it creates a natural conversation with your audience and humanizes your brand. Your audience on social media is looking for a connection with your destination as well as information, so showing some personality helps to create this connection. This is why finding a voice that represents the personality of your destination is a key factor in creating brand recognition on social media. Some of the most successful tourism marketing organizations have very distinct approaches to social media strategy. They are aware of their audience and tone, and they tell stories. While tone varies based on the social platform, your voice should remain consistent across the board.

How do I find my voice?

Finding your brand voice isn’t such a daunting task. The key to finding your voice is determining the adjectives that best describe your destination. These adjectives make up your brand voice. Is your location friendly, playful, warm or inspiring? Other questions you should consider include: What is the culture of your destination? How can you add to the conversation about your destination? What demographic are you targeting? What story do you want to tell about your destination? Answering these questions can help you find your brand voice. Narrowing your destination down to three adjectives will show what your social voice is.

How do I translate my voice to the right tone?

So now you have your social voice, what should your tone be? Tone is less about what you say, but more about how you say it. Once you have your voice, you need to work on your tone. There are a few factors that affect tone; these include your audience, social channel and the situation. Your tone has to flow naturally, so understanding these factors helps to make the social conversation more authentic. Should you use slang, emojis or convey a sense o f humor? These are all examples of ways to make your destination more relatable, but more importantly more recognizable on social media.

For more ideas, tips and resources on how to establish brand voice and tone—and to see some examples—check out this piece from Fast Company.